Do you have a regular work lunch spot? The kind of dining establishment that you run to in the middle of the work day because it's fast and decent and serves sandwiches (usually), but you'd never be caught dead in on a weekend because it'd remind you of being at work and make you sad?

The way we speak in offices now is a result of a movement to humanize the worker. Emma Green, writes about the history of office speak at The Atlantic and notes that the original reason for office speak was a shift in the thinking. Employees were no longer cogs in the machine, but individual human beings who excelled at work when they felt valued. By cloaking simple concepts in theoretical self-actualization, these phrases were meant to empower the employee and prime them for success.

Listen, I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve been skulking around gray office hellscapes for a few years now, a full-fledged member of the white-collar workplace. And whether it’s a slick downtown hellscape or a suburban campus hellscape, there’s one thing that remains as consistent as awkward kitchen small talk and IT issues: horrifically misused, utterly disgusting shared bathrooms.

Meetings! I've been in some terribly long, terribly unproductive meetings before. I once had a supervisor who felt like he was only being productive when he was in a meeting so he'd drag me into them—replacing what could have been a short email into a 20-minute conference room meeting. I tried to explain that if I was always in meetings talking about what needed to get done, I wouldn't actually be out getting anything done but it did not compute.

In the Times, an editorial by The Energy Project, which teamed up with the Harvard Business Review last fall to conduct a survey of more than 12,000 white-collar employees across a variety of different industries to understand people's engagement and productivity at work.